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Sunday, December 22, 2024
We’re well past the turn of the new year now, settled firmly into conference play, and around-the-clock talk of bracketology and Joe Lunardi on ESPN 25 hours a day is just around the corner (in the rare case with that network, this is not a bad thing-there’s never enough of affable Joe in February and March). Here are some notes from around college basketball:
Sunday capped off a wacky first weekend of conference play, and could be the start of quite a couple of months. Plus a tough loss for an Atlantic 10 team that already lost another player.
The Mountain West had been so good for so long, and then a correction happened in 2015-16. Fortunately for the conference, there is reason to believe it is not the start of a downward trend.
It turns out people do appreciate the National Invitation Tournament after all, far more than universally assumed. All it took was a little postseason saturation-the same thing that college football somehow seems immune to.
We’re on the doorstep of March now, so there isn’t much that has been left uncovered in a season, but the question must be asked: is there a better secret in college basketball this year than Fresno State?
February can be over any day now. After all that happened on a deliciously eventful Wednesday night, we’re sufficiently primed and ready for March, and the best month on the sports calendar can’t get here soon enough.
Come mid-March, December 19th may hold a special meaning to more than a few college basketball teams selected to the NCAA Tournament.
For all the first month of the 2015-16 season has brought us-the beginnings of a terrific national player of the year race; upstarts like Monmouth and Arkansas-Little Rock seemingly coming from nowhere; coaches suddenly releasing the shackles on offenses-one area where the offerings have seemed a little thin is buzzer-beating finishes.
Though still a week from Thanksgiving Day, the holiday tournament season really began yesterday, and the results from the first two events were a good sampling of the first week of the 2015-16 season as a whole.
An otherwise non-descript non-conference game in mid-November included one of the more tantalizing-and enjoyable-scenes we will see all of this college basketball season.
